Month: April 2018

If there is universal salvation, someone might object, then what difference does it make whether one believes or not, whether one is a sadist or a saint?

On my view, the difference between the fates of believers and nonbelievers, or between the fates of sadists and saints, is not in the ultimate outcome but in what each one believes about the ultimate outcome. It is their failure to believe in a good ultimate outcome — that disbelief itself — that is the sufficient punishment of nonbelievers and sadists. And I don’t mean to imply that all nonbelievers are sadists. But I do mean to imply that the unbelief of both is equivalent to a belief in a cruel pagan god, the kind that is pleased with the utter death of humans and other animals.

But what about the Christian interpretation of the sacrifice of Jesus as a way of placating an angry God? Well, I reject that interpretation, and I don’t think it is consistent with the New Testament. The crucifixion of Jesus is a turning of the table on the idea of placating an angry God. And the corrupt and spiritually blind high priest and Sanhedrin were interested in placating the worldly power of Rome and satisfying an implacable and inhumane legalistic religion. Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, so his crucifixion is an attempt to kill a man who is God, and does not please God. Then why does he will it? So that Jesus may be visibly resurrected from that death, showing that we, too, will be resurrected after our deaths. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:16-19: “For if the dead do not rise, then neither has Christ risen; and if Christ has not risen, your faith is in vain, you are still in your sins. And then also those who went to their rest in Christ are lost. If by this life in Christ we are no more than hopeful, then we are the most pitiful of all people.” And in 2 Timothy 2:11-13: “This word is to be believed: If we die with him, we shall live with him; if we endure, we shall be kings with him; if we disown him, he will disown us; if we lose our belief, he is still to be believed, for he cannot disown himself.”
(Translation by Richmond Lattimore)

Jesus’ message is life everlasting. If we disown him, that means we don’t believe in life everlasting; that is, we believe in eternal death or everlasting destruction. Our disbelief is his disowning us. He cannot disown himself; but if we don’t believe him, he can’t believe in himself for us. Notice Paul says, “if we lose our belief, he is still to be believed.” That is, even if we don’t believe it — and that disbelief itself is our punishment — it is still true that we have everlasting life. It’s just that we don’t yet believe it and so can’t enjoy it and instead live with the dread of death as permanent unconsciousness lurking always in the background of our lives. If we believe Jesus, that dread is replaced by joy. And there is good reason to believe Jesus. The very idea of permanent unconsciousness is really unthinkable. Just try to imagine it.

Is a miracle a violation of the laws of nature?

Suppose you witness a marvelous, amazing event that you did not expect to happen and is of such a nature that you did not even believe that such a thing was possible. It was beyond anything you had ever imagined or hoped for. You naturally want to share the news, and later that day you tell a friend that you had witnessed a miracle, describing to him what happened. You are not surprised when he expresses doubt: “Are you sure that is what happened? Could it be that you fell asleep momentarily and dreamed it?” After all, you yourself doubted your senses at first, thinking, “What is happening? Did I just see and hear and feel what I thought I saw and heard and felt?” You, too, consider the possibility that you were dreaming, but if so, you reckon, you are still dreaming, because you have no memory of having waked up between then and now. You have no idea of why it happened or how it happened, but you can’t doubt that it did happen, unless you really are still asleep. And you do have vague memories of having dreams in which something was happening that at first seemed ordinary and unremarkable and then, surprisingly quickly, turned into something that was not ordinary and unremarkable at all but increasingly strange and wonderful. So, you admit to your friend that it could be that you are still just dreaming that it happened and that you will wake up soon and realize that you were only dreaming that you were having this conversation with him; but you assert that in the meantime you have no doubt that you witnessed what you witnessed, even though you can’t explain how it was possible.

Your friend now suggests another possible explanation that would deflate the wonder and awe that the event had inspired in you. Could it be that you had wandered into an area where a movie was being filmed, that the equipment and crew were out of your line of vision, and that you were seeing and hearing special visual and auditory effects that the filmmakers were creating? You don’t see how that could have been the case and invite him to go with you back to the place where it happened to see if there is any evidence of that. It is only a short drive away. He accepts. You both go there, carefully inspect the area, and find no evidence of anything that could explain the strange series of events (visionary experience?) that had happened to you there. You ask several people in the general vicinity if they had seen any film crew or anything else unusual in that area. The answer is No. You show your friend the exact place where it happened, and everything looks perfectly ordinary, except that for you, though not for him, there is a subjective aura, something thrilling about the place because of what happened there.

It must somehow show in your face, because your friend now asks, with a wry smile, “Have you been indulging in some psychoactive substance?” You are not insulted. It is a reasonable question to ask. If it was an hallucination that you had suffered, then that would be at least a kind of explanation. But not much of one, for you would then wonder what would be the explanation for why you had hallucinated precisely that scene that was so marvelous and amazing, and beyond anything that you had ever imagined or hoped. What difference did it really make whether it was an hallucination or not? Either way, it would be just as awe-inspiring and just as singular compared to what came before and after. And this goes back to the dream possibility we thought of before. “Even if I am dreaming,” you think, “unless I somehow manage to forget what this was like, which to me now seems impossible, it will continue to be one of the most remarkable things that I have ever experienced.”

You realize that your friend isn’t, and in the nature of things can’t be, as interested in this question as you are. You are well aware, for example, that a dream is always more interesting to the person who dreamed it than to someone hearing about it. And skepticism seems the appropriate first response to a reported miracle. But then, dream or not, you have the stubborn feeling that this miracle you have witnessed is the realest thing that has ever happened to you.

Let us suppose, too, that although you can’t explain how it was caused by anything you did or anything anyone else did, including God; now that you’ve experienced it, you can’t escape the feeling that it sheds light on everything that happened before in your life and everything that will happen going forward.

But would such an experience be a miracle? It clearly would be one in the original sense of the word, which is of something marvelous and amazing, since that is just what I have asked you to imagine the experience to be like. But theologians and philosophers have added some metaphysical baggage to the word, so that “miracle” now also carries the meaning of an event that violates the laws of nature. For instance, John Milton wrote the following in the section with the subtitle “Of the Providence of God” in The Christian Doctrine:

“The providence of God is either ordinary or extraordinary. His ordinary providence is that whereby he upholds and preserves the immutable order of causes appointed by him in the beginning. . . . The extraordinary providence of God is that whereby God produces some effect out of the usual order of nature, or gives the power of producing the same effect to whomsoever he may appoint. This is what we call a miracle. Hence God alone is the primary author of miracles, as he only is able to invert that order of things which he has himself appointed.”

And David Hume, in his section on miracles in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, wrote this:

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined…. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.”

Now imagine that after you and your friend had parted that day, he had sent you an e-mail, with the subject heading “Still skeptical, I confess” and consisting of those two quotations. And he follows up with this continuation of the Hume quotation:

“The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), ‘That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.’”

At first, your feelings are hurt. It seems your friend has just called you a liar by way of quoting Hume. But you reflect that his skepticism is reasonable. The degree to which the experience was amazing to you is the degree to which your account of it seems incredible to him. How would you reply? Wouldn’t you be just as convinced as ever of the significance of your extraordinary experience, even though you realize that your friend will only be able to judge it by the fruit of your behavior going forward?

I can tell you how I would reply, were I in your situation. I would say that I don’t know whether what I had experienced was a violation of the laws of nature or not, that I wasn’t there when God established those laws, but that whether God had made use of his laws in ways that I don’t understand or instead had temporarily suspended those laws, I would be forever grateful for what He had shown me that day.

I have come across thoughts similar to mine regarding personal identity in two quite dissimilar books, the novel A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes (1929), and the philosophical essay System of Transcendental Idealism by F. W. J. Schelling (1800).

First, here are some passages from my books expressing the thought:

From God is a Symbol of Something True: “It is simply an irreducible fact that I am the person who I am, that you are you, that everyone else is whoever he or she is, and that each of us is unique. It can’t be explained or analyzed in terms of some more basic fact or set of facts.” (p. 120)

From Dreams and Resurrection: “The first-person perspective, the fact that, out of all the people in the world, one is just this person and no other, is simply given to each one of us. Without it, no analysis of what personal identity consists in will enable us to understand what makes a particular person the one he or she is.” (p. 120)

From Psychedelic Christianity: “What can be seen is the outside. What can’t be seen is the inside. But the inside is experienced, directly, by each one of us. Psychedelic Christianity is based on the empirical principle: try it and find out for yourself. It is a distortion of empiricism to think of it as belief in only what can be confirmed by what appears to the senses, or else we must expand our concept of ‘the senses.’ If I feel joy, for example, is that something I know through sense experience? Out of all the people I know about, I know which one I am. Is that something I know through sense experience? Whose sense experience?” (p. 60)

And here is the passage from A High Wind in Jamaica: “She had been playing houses in a nook right in the bows, behind the windlass (on which she had hung a devil’s-claw as a door-knocker); and tiring of it was walking rather aimlessly aft, thinking vaguely about some bees and a fairy queen, when it suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she. . . .

Once fully convinced of this astonishing fact, that she was now Emily Bas-Thornton (why she inserted the ‘now’ she did not know, for she certainly imagined no transmigrational nonsense of having been any one else before), she began seriously to reckon its implications.

First, what agency had so ordered it that out of all the people in the world who she might have been, she was this particular one, this Emily; born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh? Had she chosen herself, or had God done it?” (p. 84)

From System of Transcendental Idealism: “That I am limited as such follows directly from the self’s unending tendency to become an object to itself; limitation as such is therefore explicable, but it leaves the determinacy entirely free, even though both arise through one and the same act. Both taken together, that the determinate limitation cannot be determined through limitation as such, and yet that it arises along with the latter, simultaneously and through one act, means that it is one thing that philosophy can neither conceive nor explain. As surely, indeed, as I am limited as such, I must be so determinately, and this determinacy must reach into the infinite, for this infinitely outreaching determinacy constitutes my entire individuality; it is not, therefore, the fact that I am determinately limited which cannot be explained, but rather the manner of this limitation itself. For example, it can certainly be deduced in general that I belong to a determinate order of intelligences, but not that I belong to precisely this order; that I occupy a determinate position in this order, but not that it is precisely this one.” (p. 59)